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Course correction: A congregation faces the financial crisis

The events of the last two years have been humbling—even for New Yorkers, a breed not easily humbled. When I first moved to Manhattan, I was often startled when someone offered a complimentary comment about another person, saying that he or she was “really smart.” The pride that went before the particular New York fall was, more than any other human frailty, our peculiar brash pride in putative cleverness, savvy and smarts. Now there is no escaping the embarrassing fact that a lot of very smart people in New York never saw the present economic crisis coming, and that many of those smart people had been participating in the foolish decisions that contributed to it.

Support system: Networking in the suburbs

Westchester County, which lies directly north of New York City, is well known for its many classic suburban communities where cars line up at train stations at 6 p.m. each day to pick up returning executives and money managers. Through the first half of this decade, it was difficult to find homes for less than $1 million in such Westchester towns as Rye, Larchmont, Scarsdale, Chappaqua and Bedford.

Religious charities gain in a recession year: A Giving USA Foundation study

Religious organizations reported a 5.5 percent increase in donations last year, a marked contrast from the nationwide 2 percent decline in charitable giving, according to a study by the Giving USA Foundation.

Religious congregations and other religious organizations, which received 35 percent of the total $307 billion in charitable contributions, exceeded $100 billion in donations for the second year in a row.

Recession may pull seminaries apart or together: Creative solutions

The recession has forced seminaries to undertake cost-cutting measures that affect people, projects and their own best-laid plans for sustainability. “The current economic environment has magnified any weaknesses present in seminaries,” according to Daniel Aleshire, executive director of the Association of Theological Schools.

The ATS sets accreditation standards for more than 250 seminaries in the U.S. and Canada, and “for every one of them there is a different reason for their financial weakness or strength,” Aleshire said in an interview.